Devoxx follow-up: your IDE can do more!

We’ve received lots of positive feedback at Devoxx 11 last week and met many happy users of IntelliJ IDEA. But to my surprise, many of them don’t know some little productivity features that have been there for quite a while. So, I want to just highlight a couple of them in this post.

Restore layout

You may sometimes find your IDE bloated with numerous tool-windows… but there is a simple way to get rid of them and rollback to pure editor. That is achieved by the following:
1. Configure tool windows in preferred way (e.g. all tool windows are closed);
2. Remember the layout – ‘Main menu | Window | Store Current Layout as Default’;
3. Call ‘Restore Default Layout’ action (mapped to ‘Shift+F12’ by default) when it’s necessary to rollback the UI;

Soft wraps

In essence, this is the ability to show all text even when it is wider than your editor’s viewport. Use-cases: laptops, diff views, split editor, console output etc:

IntelliJ IDEA support soft wraps starting from version 10 but the feature is significantly improved in the upcoming v.11.

4 Responses to Devoxx follow-up: your IDE can do more!

The problem is that we don’t know whether particular productivity feature is known to wide circle of our customers or not. As for the mentioned features – I’ve seen at the last Devoxx that most of our users are unaware about them, that’s why the features have been highlighted here.

i like also to setup different font sizes for editor and for diff view

i like big font in editor but then the diff for submit to svn is not usable, i need to use external tools like smartsvn for it. but i like more to do all stuff in IDEA. but with the big font in diff it is not possible